Corporeal reanimation

The undead are beings in mythology, legend, or fiction that are deceased but behave as if alive. A common example of an undead being is a corpse re-animated by supernatural forces, by the application of the deceased's own life force, or that of another being (such as a demon). The undead may be incorporeal like ghosts, or corporeal like vampires and zombies. The undead are featured in the belief systems of most cultures, and appear in many works of fantasy and horror fiction. The term is also occasionally used for putative non-supernatural cases of re-animation, from early experiments like Robert E. Cornish's to future sciences such as cryonics and chemical brain preservation.

Bram Stoker considered using the title The Un-Dead for his novel Dracula (1897), and use of the term in the novel is mostly responsible for the modern sense of the word. The word does appear in English before Stoker but with the more literal sense of "alive" or "not dead", for which citations can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary. In one passage, nosferatu is given as an "Eastern European" synonym for "un-dead". Stoker's use of the term refers only to vampires, and the extension to other types of supernatural beings arose later. Most commonly, it is now taken to refer to supernatural beings which had at one time been alive and continue to display some aspects of life after death, but the usage is highly variable.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is a seminal text in 19th-century discourse about the creation of life. Published in 1818, it was based on a number of sources, including Ovid's myth of Prometheus (indeed, the novel is subtitled "The Modern Prometheus"), Milton's Paradise Lost, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and William Beckford's Gothic novel Vathek. Shelley also drew on European folklore, such as the medieval Jewish legend of the golem, and German, Czech and Moravian ghost stories featuring vengeful dead (many of whom have characteristics of vampires rather than zombies).

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